Your rates are capped at 3.2 per cent this year. The council lifted most of its fees by 5.2

The number most people know about council money is the rate peg, and for Central Coast in 2026-27 it is 3.2 per cent. The number almost nobody sees is what happens to everything else the council charges for: the field hire, the certificate copy, the tip, the road-reserve permit. We downloaded the adopted Fees and Charges schedules for 2026-27 and 2025-26, 132 and 136 pages, and matched 684 individual fees across the two. The median rise is 5.20 per cent, and most of the schedule moved by exactly that figure. Nothing improper is happening here. The rate peg has never applied to fees, and that is the part worth understanding.

26 August 2026 · both adopted schedules and the IPART rate peg file, read in full

Two caps, and only one of them is a cap

Each year the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal sets a rate peg for every NSW council. It limits how much a council’s general income, which for most councils is rates, can grow. For Central Coast in 2026-27 IPART’s published file gives a core peg of 3.0 per cent and a final peg of 3.2 per cent after a 0.2 per cent population factor.

Fees are a different instrument entirely. The schedule says so on its first page: fees are charged under section 608 of the Local Government Act 1993, which lets a council charge for a service it provides other than one covered by an annual charge. The council sets each fee under one of four pricing policies it discloses in the schedule: a statutory charge set by regulation, full cost plus a margin, full cost, or a contribution toward cost with the rest subsidised.

So there is no cap on the fee schedule, and no requirement that it track the peg. That is not a loophole, it is the design. It does mean that if you want to know what the council will charge you next year, the rate peg tells you about one line on one bill and nothing else.

What the schedule actually did

Matching fees between the two adopted schedules gives 684 that appear in both under the same name and can be compared directly. Of those:

Movement in 684 matched fees, 2025-26 to 2026-27, GST inclusive
Measure	Value
Median change	+5.20%
Middle half of all fees (interquartile range)	+4.20% to +5.22%
Fees that went up	630
Fees unchanged	48
Fees that went down	6
IPART final rate peg for comparison	+3.2%

The striking thing in that table is not the median, it is how tight the middle is. A large block of the schedule moved by exactly 5.20 per cent: daily seasonal field hire, signage at the airport, a certified copy of a document, a land transfer developers fee, special mowing requests. Different services, different departments, the same figure to two decimal places. That is the signature of a single indexation rate applied across the schedule, not of hundreds of separate pricing decisions.

Six fees fell and 48 did not move, which is a reminder that the schedule is not purely mechanical. Some fees are Category A, set by regulation elsewhere, and the council cannot move them at all.

The exceptions are where the decisions are

Away from the indexed block, a handful of fees were repriced rather than indexed, and those are deliberate choices. The two largest increases in the matched set are both event bonds. The large event security bond went from $1,228.45 to $3,000.00, and the major event security bond from $2,456.95 to $6,000.00. Both land on round numbers, which is what a decision looks like as opposed to an indexation.

We are naming those two and not the rest of the extremes, deliberately. Several of the largest movements sit on fee lines with short generic names in the schedule, and we could not satisfy ourselves that the same words meant the same service in both years. That is explained in the method below.

Why this matters more this year than most

Central Coast ratepayers are already inside a longer money story. The council’s adopted ten-year plan assumes a permanent special rate variation from 2031 to replace the temporary one that expires that year, and its own base case without that variation has unrestricted cash at minus $405.8 million by 2035-36. Its 2026-27 capital works program holds $22 million back as a contingency, funded by deferring twelve projects rather than by adding to the budget.

Our view, labelled as such: a 5.2 per cent fee indexation is not a scandal and is not hidden. It is published in a 132-page document that anyone can download, which is more than many councils manage. But the gap between the number residents hear about, 3.2, and the number applied to most of what they actually pay at a counter, 5.2, is real, and no summary published alongside the schedule points it out. A single line in the council’s budget communications saying which indexation rate was applied to fees, and why, would close that gap entirely and cost nothing.

What we are not saying

We are not saying the council has exceeded any cap, because no cap applies. We are not saying 5.2 per cent is too high; we have not examined the cost base behind any individual fee, and several of the four pricing policies are explicitly cost-recovery, so a fee rising with costs is the schedule working as designed. And we are not reporting a total revenue effect, because the schedule gives prices and not volumes, so there is no way from this document to say what any of it collects.

How we did this, including what we threw away

We downloaded both adopted schedules from the council’s Delivery Program and Operational Plan publications page: Fees and Charges 2026-27 (132 pages) and the 2025-26 schedule as republished on 30 October 2025 (136 pages). Prices used are the GST-inclusive column. The rate peg figures come from IPART’s published spreadsheet of final rate pegs and components for all 128 NSW councils for 2026-27.

The first method we tried was wrong, and it would have produced a confident article full of invented numbers. Every fee in the schedule carries a four-digit number, which looks exactly like a stable identifier to join the two years on. It is not. We tested it before using it, by checking whether the same number carried the same fee name in both years, and 1,341 of 1,354 shared numbers did not. The numbering is positional and was reassigned when the schedule was restructured, so fee 0010 is “Administrative fee, medium event” in one year and “Small Event, Full Day Event” in the next. Anyone repeating this work should not join on that number.

What we used instead is the fee name, restricted to names that appear exactly once in each schedule so that a match is unambiguous. That yields 684 comparable fees out of roughly 960 distinct names per year. The excluded remainder are fees whose names repeat within a schedule, and fees that appear in only one of the two years. The result is therefore a description of the stable, comparable core of the schedule and not of every fee the council charges.

The tightness of the result is itself the check that the matching worked: a large cluster of unrelated services landing on precisely 5.20 per cent is a pattern a faulty join does not produce. We have not asked the council which indexation rate it applied, and it may be published somewhere we did not find.

Sources

Central Coast Council, Fees and Charges 2026-27 (PDF, 132 pages, downloaded and read 26 August 2026): the adopted schedule, the section 608 basis, the four pricing policy categories, and every 2026-27 price used above.
Central Coast Council, Fees and Charges 2025-26 (PDF, 136 pages, republished 30 October 2025, downloaded and read 26 August 2026): every 2025-26 price used above.
IPART, Final rate pegs and components for all councils 2026-27 (XLSX, downloaded and read 26 August 2026): Central Coast’s core rate peg of 3.0 per cent, population factor of 0.2 per cent and final rate peg of 3.2 per cent.
Central Coast Council, Delivery Program and Operational Plan publications: the page carrying both adopted schedules. Read 26 August 2026.

See an error? Request a correction and we will check it against the sources above and log the outcome.